[LINK] NZ's rammed-through copyright law mass warrantless surveillance and publication of accused's browsing habits

[Kim Holburn]

On 2011/Apr/26, at 1:57 PM, Jan Whitaker wrote:

> At 01:22 PM 26/04/2011, Kim Holburn wrote:
>>> 
>>> But if internet users produce evidence that "shows" the 
>> presumption of guilt does not apply, the burden of proof goes back 
>> on the copyright owner to prove an offence.
>>> 
>>> While that is causing confusion, Mr Kumar believes it will not be 
>> enough for internet users to simply say "it wasn't me", in order to 
>> dispute a claim and reverse the onus of proof. "Lawyers I have 
>> spoken to say you would have to say exactly why you disagree. How 
>> you would prove your innocence, that, at the moment is the biggest 
>> unknown for us."
>>> 
>>> Ms Corbett says a weakness of the legislation is that rights 
>> holders do not appear to need to prove they own the copyright of 
>> the work in question, which she says should be a "basic 
>> requirement", although they must provide evidence of ownership to 
>> the tribunal.
> 
> so we're back to the pirated use of the neighbour's wifi again.

That is one possibility I suppose, especially if you hate your neighbours and you don't think you'll ever get caught.  Kinda risky though.  You could simply use a VPN.  Then you effectively you wouldn't be in NZ (or Australia).  The thing that will happen fairly quickly I should think, is the use of this legislation as a way of teaching politicians and media a lesson.  Perhaps they'll make exceptions for politicians and corporations.

> Seems like the best thing to do is to open the flood gates and at least you'll have a defence!

In Germany you can get a (small) fine for leaving your wifi open.  Which is just silly of course.  Leaving your wifi open is also dangerous for a number of reasons.  Anyone in the vicinity can see all the clear traffic on your network.  Unless you have a wifi router and a techie and can set up more than one SSID/VLAN or you can be bothered to use VPN (which is the best solution for wifi security anyway).  In addition having an open wifi doesn't make a lot of sense in the Australian environment where we have such restrictive download caps.  In other places with no download caps it makes a lot more sense and could even be considered right neighbourly.

-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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